Agriculture officials convened at a conference in Dong Nai province on June 12 to look for solutions to improve earnings of cashew farmers and arrest the shrinking cashew acreage.
Agriculture officials convened at a conference in Dong Nai province on June 12 to look for solutions to improve earnings of cashew farmers and arrest the shrinking cashew acreage.
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Phan Minh Dao, Director of the Dong Nai Department of Agriculture and Rural Development, said it was difficult for the southern province to maintain the existing area of 45,000 hectares under cashew farming.
Vo Van Chanh, Vice Chairman of Dong Nai provincial People's Committee, told the conference that a hectare generated 1.1 tons of cashew nuts on average and the price of this nut ranged from VND17,000 to VND30,000 per kilo.
Dao calculated one hectare of cashew brought in VND6.3 million, equivalent to 20% of coffee and only 7% of pepper. Now earnings from cashew farming are the lowest compared to other plants in the southern province.
Dao said low incomes had forced farmers to shift to other high-yield plants.
“Thus, to keep the cashew farming area, there should be a good mechanism to support cashew prices,” Dao said.
Nguyen Duc Thanh, Chairman of the Vietnam Cashew Association (Vinacas), said domestic cashew prices depended much on global prices and fluctuations on the domestic market were inevitable if global prices dropped.
Thanh said as Vietnam had yet to build strong brands for its cashew products and that local enterprises mainly exported low-value cashew nuts.
“Processors and exporters can purchase unprocessed cashew nuts at VND20,000-22,000 per kilo and these prices would remain unchanged in the coming years,” Thanh said.
This is one of the reasons why the national area under cashew farming has slid in the past nine years, from over 433,000 hectares in 2005 to more than 313,000 hectares last year.
This meant a decline of 15,000 hectares of cashew farming each year, said Nguyen Van Hoa, Deputy Director of the Plant Cultivation Department under the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development.
The shrinking area has led to a severe shortage of material supply for local processing enterprises and rises in import of unprocessed nuts, which stood at 651,000 tons last year.
(Source: SGT)
